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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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It happened twice in the last six months…
I retire at a reasonable hour,
look out of my window and
see that everything is normal… Beyond the shadowed oak tree the moon stands
white above the National Guard Armory across the road… Everything seems to be
still and only a single light burns in the building… I go to bed cherishing the
balm and healing of this quietness… this daily return of God’s
silence…

Six or seven hours pass and while the
morning coffee begins to boil I look out the window
again… The oak is still there, its leaves wet with the coming of rain,
and the road to the West, and the fields beyond it… But the
Armory!… Where late last night there was only a single light,
the silence and a brooding moon there is now a startling gathering of tanks,
trucks and armored cars… They stand row on row, perhaps
fifty of them, so arranged that they can move quickly
and purpose fully to the West… a far cry from the still shadows and the
quietness of the night.

My sons, more
tolerant of history and life and more cynical, tell me
that these trucks and tanks, reflecting man at work in God’s
universe, are there because there is something
called a “race riot” over in
Gary and the Governor has called out the militia to stop it… In Gary men are talking desperately

— but if no agreement is reached and the
talks fail the argument will be moved into a totally different
context — not American, not Christian,
not even human… The brown monsters across the road will begin to move fifteen
miles west to stop the argument in the one way in which it will not be stopped
permanently — by force by guns, by naked power… This is clearly the way
to achieve peace… by firing a few shots up in the air — surely they would not
aim at the little black boy who is grabbing a pair of shoes from a broken
window — just into the air confident that whoever is up there will not care
very much… since He will never be hit…

As I have noted,
this has happened twice in the last few months… It is becoming a part of our
life and we rush to the window each morning to take the temperature of our
black friends in Gary… Are the armored trucks still here?… If they are,
it means that nothing much happened in Gary last night… a few black men were
shot, a few stores were looted — and the same
black cloud over everything… of hate and desperation… of hate and anger… of
hate and no hope… but al ways hate… The quiet of the night, ordained
from the third day of creation, becomes a mockery and a lie…

Many of my friends feel that this is
really the shape of things to come… This is the way we are and shall be… This
is not 1776, they say, and
tanks and guns will be an essential part of a working democracy… This is an age
which worships only stark power… The quietness of our long comfortable night
has been broken by our new realism… our new cynicism in human affairs…
our corporate death-wish… Let us live now by bringing death, either
over Hiroshima or the streets of Gary… This summer night in the year of our
Lord 1968 is the winter of our faith and our optimistic prophesies v>f the
future — the old worn prophetic lion and lamb stuff…
These are only our vague hopes finding last stammering words… seeing their final
contradiction in the silent serried ranks of armored monsters across the road…

And so I stand at my window and look out
at the night now almost at noon… The monsters are still there but their shape
and size have been softened by the gracious night… This is the very edge of
darkness and standing on the brink I feel — more than I think — that there are
still lost causes which are finally never lost… I remember a strange lullaby of
many years ago:

Night comes on, Night,
and the peace you have desired —
Earth is calling, you are tired; Earth draws you down.

The hope, the fear
The labor vain — your heart grows cold.
Time’s secret is untold
The light fails that led you here.

Sleep then; sleep is best
The roads are many where we go astray
But all, all by the one way Come home,
at the one heart have rest.

That will not stop the monsters across
the road but it will rob them of all final meaning… and that makes my
pilgrimage a little easier…